E3 2002: Pro Race Driver Hands-on

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We get up close and personal with Codemasters' cool looking CarPG racing title.

By Dan Adams

Codemasters is having a good year for the racing circuit. Not only are they bringing out the next version of their great rally racing series Colin McRae, but they have what their positioning as the first CarPG. Sure it sounds a little corny, but it's actually a really interesting idea and after getting a chance to try Pro Race Driver out on all of the systems, I can say it also plays very well.

The big kick behind this one is that it's a story based racer. Meaning that you play as a driver as he goes through his career, but there's motivation for this guy. There's a reason for his and your desire to reach the top, which should hopefully keep you racing along instead of the normal career mode in racing games that comes barebones.

The story follows Ryan McKane, a up and coming racer that had the serious misfortune of seeing his father die in an accident during a race with more than a little of the blame being set on another driver. You need to get to the top and prove that you're the best of the best and make your dead father proud. Or something like that... Along the way, you'll need to race against your brother and other Pro Racers in order to unlock the some of the 40 cars in the game and 38 tracks.

Today was the first real chance I had to take a look at some of the cutscenes they'll be using to progress the story including the opening scene. All of them are done real time in the in game engine. Not only does this keep things grounded in the game world that's presented in the game, it gives them the opportunity to use some neat tricks to make you feel like you're really a part of the game. Take for example, cutscenes that take place in the pit or near the garage. It allows the scenes to take whatever car you were just racing with and put it in the scene along with all of the damage that it took during the course of the race.

Speaking of damage, try not to crash. In my experience with the game, driving into a wall at 60mph when you forgot to slow down to come around a turn will cause a smidgeon of damage. Your car will be unhappy with you and perform that way. Not only is that damage cosmetically good, several parts of the car are destructible and can fall off onto the track, it will also affect gameplay if the right parts are damaged. While it won't go so far as to stop working completely, you'll definitely notice that you can't take turns as well as you used to.

After playing the game on all the PC, Xbox, and PS2, I can say that none of these systems will be disappointed by the controls. Of course, they had a nice fat steering wheel set up in front of the PC version, so I had to lean a little in that direction, but the game plays very solidly on each of the platforms.

The main differences between the three are as you would expect. The PC version looks the nicest with the highest resolution. Both the Xbox and PS2 look good as well, the Xbox looking a little better than the PS2 mainly due to the capabilities of the Xbox where textures and models can be a bit better. Regardless of platform, the game runs very smoothly. The cars are very nicely modeled from the crappy low level cars you'll need to drive at the beginning of the game to the high end, kick your ass supercars.

Tracks themselves are also pretty detailed with plenty of objects modeled off of more than a few real world tracks. The game is taking advantage of some of the good features found in the high end graphics cards and Xbox, such as specular highlighting and bumpmapping on the raosds. Of course there's still some improvements to be made for a little mmore optimzation and to fix some draw distance issues that are popping in objects.

Once they've fixed this one up, I'm guessing gamers are going to be in for a racing treat. Expect to see this one on store shelves in October.